What a prize: my anti-cryogenic
Strength has preserved the code
To conjure my kind back.

Exhumed from earth’s wet memory
(Who dares re-awaken me?)
Entombed in glass and sold for obscene show –
What they may unleash they do not know.

Epistle To My Paedophile

Doubtless you won’t comprehend
my writing you this way;
for you are harmless
now, breathing

in laboured rasps, your body
neutralised
by the karmic stroke
of luck which all the girls
you might have met
don’t even know
they should be glad of.

I was not so fortunate.
I knew you when your limbs
still had the power to insinuate
themselves into Christmas lunch
and re-calibrate the trajectory
of uneventful lives.

(Strange, I never thought to tell,
the chest of smut beneath your bed,
the dancing doll’s skirt, lifted to reveal —
Or your pudgy hands which turned like moles
in the incestuous burrows of their pockets,
jingling coins that lured, and repelled…)

What a relief it was today to find them stilled.
Pale members, no longer in the service
of the perverse familial compulsion
which thwarted me, as it did you.

Instead, you have become the baby
you once must have been:
helpless (hapless?) in your cot,
as I was, legs akimbo;
and this is perfect, a perfect way of seeing
because the unsullied space of your mute
presence allows me to impute
whatever version of this I want to —

from your side, recognition, remorse;
from mine, forgiveness, love.

But I don’t need that now.
We are at peace, you and I,
our transaction complete.
There is no more fear.

Only wonder, at how one clot of blood
lodged within a flawed man’s brain
can assuage so much suffering:
what a wise solution, so elegant,
the vessels swollen to bursting
with compassion for us all —
surely that drop was placed, just so,
by the delicate hand of God.

Mother

When fixing the bedclothes
I always remember to pause
by the fighting fish’s tank:Om mani padme hum, I intone;
and at least it helps me feel calmer.

I’m careful to give the cat extra pats
now that the dog has come. The dog
was a gift for the children, but of course
it’s me who shovels his shit.

I cup his sumptuous neck in my hands
and jiggle the swathes of skin so he knows
that it’s going to be ok; we’re his family now;
no need to roll those accusatory eyes.

Still, he keeps following me
around the house, always pining for — something.
It bothers me because will there ever be enough
something to make him happy?

My husband’s not happy. When he tries
the tension of his pretence rises and rises
till it bursts.

I’m not sure where my eldest is:
only want drives her home.
On her first night on earth, before I knew her cry
she squalled for hours from the nursery.Why doesn’t someone shut that baby up?
I thought, before the nurse brought her to me.Here, she said, you’ll have to take her —
Now it’s my job to shut her up.

My youngest child still gleams like dreams in dirt.
When I clutch her to my heart and pray
for the impossible, my tears
make her glisten.

On Reading Bishop

after Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Giant Snail’
(for PS Cottier)

A peaceful life is arduous
to attain; desire’s
not enough, nor positive aim —
one side’s withdrawal is always the other’s gain.

What germ inside us inclines towards hate?
It seems to me there must be something
rank and spindly
tangled in the hub of our hearts
disordering their true rotation
until we become beings whose frequency
is attuned to blame.

Therefore, I hold my words
on a parsimonious rein.

Reading Bishop, a distinctive stillness comes.
Like her giant snail I too inch forward
my own amorphous, unguarded
foot absorbing sharp barbs of gravel
avoiding rough spears of grass
as I push, bull-headed, to gain a crack
in God’s sanctuary before sunrise.